It may surprise some people, back when stories were first written about America's frontier experience, they were all set in what is now the Eastern U.S. This is because until at least the time of the Civil War, 1861-1865, the frontier of settlement was to the east of the Mississippi River. The term "western" did not even come into being until the early Twentieth Century.
The earliest frontier stories were works by classy authors like James Fennimore Cooper. However, the frontier story reached its greatest audience in the form of dime novels. These works received their name due to both their length and their price. They first became a mass marketing phenomenon during the Civil War when bored troops on both sides were desperately in need of escape from the utter dullness of life in the camps.
Dime novels were the literary equivalent of the yellow journalism that also began about the time of the Civil War. Dime novels were sensationalistic to the extreme and often featured a great deal of violence. The characters works were heroes of the Dudley Do-Right variety, the villains of the Snidely Whiplash type and he heroines were always as pure as silk. The prose was always purple and sentences often ended with multiple exclamation marks.
Dime Novels were where series fiction got its start. Previously, it was rare for authors to use the same character in more than one work, such as Falstaff in some of the plays of William Shakespeare. At least one of these series characters, Nick Carter aka Nicholas Carter, is till around today. Of the fictional dime novel characters, Deadwood Dick is perhaps the best well known.
Oddly enough, dime novels used real life people as characters. Western dime novels used such folks as William F. Cody aka "Buffalo Bill," James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok, Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley and Kit Carson as characters. By far and away, the most popular real life persons used as fictional characters were Frank and Jesse James. Of course, all of thee dime novel exploits of real life people were purely fictional. The laws governing such things have been changes to make this practice flat out illegal.
Whatever their morality, taste and legal ethics, the dime novel ushered in the western as a literary form and it is still here to stay.
An Introduction to PBEMs:
PBEM stands for "Play By E-Mail," games. In PBEMs, the Game Master
allots turns to the players who respond with their character's intended actions.
These games were he natural outgrowth of the play by postal mail games of
pre-Internet times.
If you want to try out a PBEM, look one up on the search engines. There are
websites that have information on them. Input PBEM into a search engine
and just see what you get. Follow the stated rules and email a character.
If the E-Gaming Master selects you, then you are all set.
If you don't find any PBEMs that appeal to you, then you can create your own game.
However, you will need to know how to create a decent website as well as how to create
a decent game. You should be warned that there are a great many folks who created online
games thinking that it would be a fun project, only to find that it is a pretty time consuming thing.
Its also a lot harder to do than you might think.
If you are interested in learning more about how to play and/or operate a
Play By E-Mail game your own, then one classic reference to read is
"An Argosy of Play By E-Mail Advice" by Sean K. Reynolds that you can find at:
http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/pbem_faq.html
Other places to learn about PBEMs and also find a game to play is:
PBEM2 at http://www.pbem2.com/
PBEM Players at http://www.pbemplayers.com/
The Kennel Murder Case (1933)
The Kennel Murder Case (1933)
Wealthy gentleman about town Philo Vance (William Powell) solves yet another case that the stupid cops led by Detective Sergeant Heath (Eugene Pallette) and District Attorney Markham (Robert McEwan) are too stupid to solve. The Philo Vance series of movies set the pattern for how the police would be protrayed in cenema for the next two decades. It was not until Dragnet came along that a correction in popular culture was made.
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